It is November, and whatever your financial year, somewhere in your organisation a spreadsheet is being rolled forward into 2027. The EAP contract, the wellbeing app licences, the resilience workshop, the mental health first aid refresher. Each line carries last year's number, plus a little for indexation. Few people have spent much time considering their real value, or whether they are still the right investment. It is the most efficient decision the organisation makes all year, and the least examined.
A renewal asks one question: do we still want this? A review asks a harder one: what did this change, and is it the best use of the money for the risks we actually have? The first takes ten minutes. The second takes a conversation few organisations ever schedule.
This post is about asking the second question before anything rolls over.
Most renewals are decided by default
Renewal rewards continuity. A contract that caused no complaints looks like a contract that worked. The utilisation report arrives, usage looks reasonable, and the line rolls over.
But the absence of complaint is not evidence of effect. A service can be well run, well regarded and still be working on the wrong layer of the problem. In my post An EAP is three things, I described how many organisations bought the counselling component and measured it as the whole program. Renewal is where that assumption gets carried forward for another year, often without anyone choosing it.
The question is not whether the things you buy are good. Many are. It is whether the mix matches the hazards in front of you.
The meeting where it happens
Picture it. HR brings the renewals. Finance asks whether the numbers have moved. Someone mentions that the app had lower take-up than hoped, but people liked the webinar. The decision takes fifteen minutes, because nothing on the table has failed.
What is not on the table is the risk register. The engagement survey comments about workload. The team that lost three people in six months. The restructure planned for the second quarter. These sit in different meetings, owned by different people, and they rarely meet the budget line that is meant to address them.
That is the gap. Spend is organised by what was bought last year. Risk is organised by what is happening this year.
What the evidence shows, and what it does not
In 2024, William Fleming of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre analysed survey data from 46,336 workers across 233 UK organisations (Fleming, 2024). Workers who took part in individual-level offerings, such as resilience training, stress management, relaxation classes and wellbeing apps, reported wellbeing no better than colleagues who did not.
It is worth being precise about what that shows. The study is cross-sectional and self-reported, so it cannot establish cause, and people who are already struggling may be more likely to sign up. It does not show that any particular service lacks value. It shows that taking part in individual-level offerings, on its own, was not associated with better wellbeing across hundreds of workplaces. That is a reason to ask what else your budget is doing, not a reason to cancel anything.
Three tests before anything rolls over
Which hazard does this address? Name it, in the language of your risk assessment. If a line item cannot be matched to an identified psychosocial hazard, it may still be worth keeping, but it is not a control for that hazard.
Where does it sit in the order of controls? Under Australian work health and safety law, duty holders must eliminate psychosocial risks so far as is reasonably practicable, and where that is not possible, minimise them. Support services sit further down that order than changes to the work itself. If you split last year's spend into prevention and response, as in Split your wellbeing spend in two, this is where the ratio becomes a decision.
What would tell us it worked? Agree it now, before the money is spent. Not utilisation, which counts attendance, but a change you would expect to see in the work or the team.
Who needs to be in the room
The budget usually sits with HR. The risk often sits with WHS. The work sits with operational leaders. Renewal is the rare moment when all three have a reason to sit at the same table, and it is the kind of conversation Advisory work usually starts with.
Bring the risk register to the budget meeting, not only the invoices. If the people who own the hazards are not in the room, the renewal will be decided by the people who own the contracts.
Internationally, ISO 45003 frames it the same way: psychological health and safety managed through the organisation's health and safety system, not in a separate wellbeing budget alongside it.
Worth asking
1. Which of our renewals did we actively decide on this year, and which simply rolled over?
2. Can we match each line item to a psychosocial hazard on our risk register?
3. What share of our spend sits with supporting people, and what share with changing the work?
4. If we could fund one thing next year that changed how the work is designed or led, what would it be, and why is it not already in the budget?
The point
A renewal keeps what you have. A review asks whether what you have still fits.
Most of what you buy may well stay. The difference is that this time, it will be a decision.
The questions in this post take an afternoon. The spend they decide lasts all of 2027.
Stay Curious,
Genevieve
A review starts with the risks in front of you, not last year's invoice. Advisory starts there too.
This article is general information about work design and leadership capability. It is not legal advice, work health and safety advice, or clinical advice.
